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Thursday, May 27, 2010

For those that don't know, The Ubuntu Foundations Team is responsible for delivering the core Ubuntu system, which is common to the whole Ubuntu family of products and services. For the past couple months, I had the pleasure and honour to work with the Foundations team, assisting in preparation for the Foundations Track at UDS and planning for the 10.10 cycle.

Below I will give a brief summary of the major topics covered at UDS which, in turn, generated scheduled work items. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Boot Work

Several boot-related areas were identified for work during Maverick. These include the following:

cd boot - by converting CD boot to use grub2 with its new graphical goodness, we will only need to maintain use of a single bootloader

continued performance improvements

grub2 framebuffer - the end goal being a near flicker-free graphical boot splash experience

Just after an LTS release is a perfect time to clean house. We will be taking this opportunity to do so, with such work as dropping unused/unneeded packages from the base system, double-checking package dependencies, and investigating space-saving measures.

The installer is getting a serious make-over. Foundations and the Design team are working very closely together, improving the workflow, minimizing user clicks, improving the look-and-feel, and providing utility with increased ease of use.

We want to get new applications into the Software Center, ideally providing developers with a means of generating revenue with the applications. For the former, we need to define some good social and technical processes to ensure ongoing quality and excellent producer/consumer experience. In conjunction with that, we need to work on getting a billing system in place.

Upstart is getting major work this cycle. New and improved features include the following:

Manual mode

Resource limits

Dependencies

Better support for UIs that want to use Upstart

Simple skeleton to make life easier for sysadmins

Provide an API for services and tasks so that folks don't have to think about the event-based model if they don't need to

Explore the conversion of conf files into jobs

Possibly extend the debug capabilities into an interactive mode

Improve job disabling

Foundations will also be working closely with the server team to get their init scripts converted to Upstart. Conversely, the Kernel team will be providing new features that will allow Foundations to fully develop the planned Upstart features.